Business council led by Navdeep Bains to study COVID-19 impacts on industry

Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains gives an update on the government's measures to help Canadians with the effects of COVID-19 pandemic in Ottawa on Mar. 20, 2020. Andrew Meade/iPolitics

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains announced on Friday the formation of a new team of business leaders that intends to identify the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadian industry.

Bains shared the foundation of the council at a televised press conference Friday, saying the government will bring private sector business leaders to the table to share their perspectives on the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

“As our government examines what is needed in this immediate crisis, we need to fully understand all of the challenges,” he said. “We are going to work in collaboration with our industry to understand and to make sure that we come out of this stronger and we come out of this together.”

The announcement comes following the release of Statistics Canada’s April labour force survey earlier in the day, which showed that over 3 million Canadians have lost their jobs since the beginning of the COVID-19-fuelled economic shutdown.

As well, the survey, which reflects the labour market during the week of April 12 to 18, shows that 5.5 million Canadians were either unemployed or working substantially reduced hours — equal to more than a quarter of the country’s labour force prior to the pandemic.

Bains said the survey shows that many people are hurting from COVID-19 and workers in some sectors were “hit very hard” and the government must support them. He said the government’s approach is to be “proactive and strategic.”

The minister said the council would leverage the federal government’s existing panels that team with businesses, which it calls its “Economic Stragey Tables,” to consult with specific industry’s leaders, and that it would add new groups on retail and transportation to respond to “particular pressure related to the pandemic.” The new tables will be joining existing ones on advanced manufacturing, agri-food, and health and bio-sciences, among others.

Some of the issues the tables will be studying over the next 90 days, he said, include workforce disruption, re-establishing supply chains and consumer confidence.